There are many industries that utilize flat rolled products in their manufacturing processes. Some of the key industries include consumer goods manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, residential and commercial building product suppliers, and machine manufacturers. These industries depend on roller levelers to produce quality parts that can help them reduce production costs, reduce assembly time and eliminate costly secondary processing requirements. To meet customer expectations, businesses that offer material processing equipment must provide machines that can produce uniform and accurately dimensioned products on a consistent basis.
There are a variety of shape defects that may arise in flat rolled metal materials. Mill induced defects in metal materials can include, for example, wavy edges, center buckles, quarter buckles, crossbow, and coil set. Such shape defects may be caused by misaligned rolls or other substandard equipment or manufacturing processes that can be found in an array of processing lines. Regrettably, material related shape problems result in inefficient operations at downstream processing plants, and material variability or inconsistency can cause production delays, customer dissatisfaction, and many other problems and potential costs. Unfortunately, conventional leveler machines generally suffer from lack of precision in their performance to attempt to correct these material defects. Such conventional machines also typically rely too heavily or unreasonably on the know-how of operators to produce a quality product.
In view of the problems described above, more effective and efficient systems and processes are needed that can address the deficiencies of conventional procedures for processing metal materials.